About Me
 - JAI GOPAL SETHI
- I was born before partition at KOHAT (in NWFP, PAKISTAN). After partition I along with my family migrated to Delhi. I completed higher secondary from Ramjas Higher Secondary School No.5 Karol Bagh, New Delhi in 1958. I did Pre-Engineering from Delhi Polytechnic, Kashmere Gate New Delhi in 1959.(NOW IT IS CALLED DCE ,DELHI COLLEGE OF ENHINEERING) I then completed my B.E.(Civil) in Year 1962 from University Of Roorkee. After my Engineering I joined as an Assistant Engineer (class II gazette post) in UP IRRIGATION DEPARTMENT through UP PSC. I worked in tube well department and construction projects dealing with Heavy Earth moving machines. I retired as Superintending Engineer. I was posted in several location around UP including Mainpuri(Lower Ganga canal Division) Aligarh, Atrauli, Allahabad, Meerut,(TubewllDivisions)Jhansi, Roorkee, Lucknow, Gorakhpur (civil Canal Divisions and later on Canal circles) etc. Now I am settled in Saket New Delhi and am the President of M-Block (NE) Saket Cultural and Niwasi Welfare Association, New Delhi. I also served as honorary secretary of the Association for 4 years. It is my endeavor to serve humanity at grass root level.
I am writing this story when we were facing the hardships after the partition. After Shahbad Markanda (district Ambala) we all shifted to Agra as our cousin Tayaji used to live there. In Agra did not have any place to live we all put up in the deserted house in the CHAKKI PARA near Bus stop and opposite of Agra RED FORT. This was half broken and there was a leather market on the ground floors and the residents on the first floor. We started living there but faced hardships at every step of the way.
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I had this rare phone call from Irfan Khan in Mumbai in the wake of an e-mail he had received from Kini. We, Irfan and I, have been in e-mail touch for some time now. Our exchange was usually about sharing media/web articles of mutual interest. I usually e-mailed friends and contacts about something I had written on the web, in the belief that they would be as enthusiastic reading the stuff as I was writing it. A friend of mine calls it GVK’s brag-mail. Many of them respond with flattering one-liners –‘very interesting’, ‘keep it up’, or some such suitably polite words. But a phone call was rare; and Irfan’s call went on for the better part of an hour.
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What a deft portrait that my friend GVK has drawn of Shroff Saab who could be a great character in a Naipaul or even better a Prawer Jhabawala story, a person beached and stranded like a whale which lost its way. I must confess that I have the vaguest memories of this phantasmagorical character and it could not have been me who told GVK in Chennai in 1996 of Shroff Saab’s passing away.
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No talk about India Weekly can be complete without a reference to Shroff Saab. Shroff Akhtar Ali was a quiet man; always pondering over something that had to do with the headline, the wordage or his re-write of someone else’s story - Kini’s and mine, usually. The man had licence to meddle with anyone’s text. And there was no appeal against his doings.
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Kini, in an earlier post, says I forgot to mention the media oligarch, Dr Tarapada Basu, who brought out London’s India Weekly in the sixties. A great soul (despite what Kini says).Tarada, as he was fondly addressed among the local Bangla crowd, was undisputed doyen of London-based Indian journalists of his days.
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